Emotional Intelligence: Cultivating Immensely Human Interactions

“Experts” (think they) know; wise experts want to learn. Wisdom is about humble curiosity and learning. If we want to change, we are able to change.

Emotions are a defining feature of the human condition; they structure our social relationships and imbue our lives with meaning and purpose.

-Gerben Van Kleef, Emotions Scholar

7 Essential Questions

Do emotions have a place at work? Is it possible to be more emotionally attuned and professional at the same time?
How can knowing more about ourselves help us and help our connections with others?
How can emotions help us become wiser?
How can we manage our social-emotions to increase resiliency?
What is lost when we rely on the spoken word? Is it possible to to have efficient communication relying only on the spoken word? What does research say about the ways in which we can gather much more information from the social context and be that more effective by being more emotionally intelligent?
What is lost when you read the emotions of a person but not the collective? What does it take to work in a team or to be a leader and really understand the importance of seeing the forest, not just a tree? What is gained when you shift your focus from a person to people?
What do transformative mentors and lasting legacies have in common?

Lesson 1: Do emotions have a place at work?

There’s a competitive advantage of leveraging our deeply human abilities at social interaction.

In business, we try to pretend that emotions don’t exist, to try to be completely unemotional and rational, which is a fiction. Without emotions you actually can’t make a decision, because you make your decisions based on what you care about.”

-Chris Voss, Former lead FBI negotiator

When you have more mixed feelings as opposed to simply being optimistic or pessimistic for example, you’re able to make better use of complex and conflicting information. That’s exactly what’s needed when you’re making decisions under uncertainty and in complex situations.

The yellow part of the model is focused on “you.” How do we “grow” what we know about ourselves?

Known parts of ourselves can be improved upon with reflection and self-analysis
Unknown parts of ourselves can be improved upon with feedback from others

When you are aware of your own behaviors and you decide to do a behavior more or less, if you can, a next step to go even deeper might be to ask someone, someone you trust to be your partner in change. Ask them to watch you and give you feedback as to how you’re doing with your goal.

The Paradox of Acting “Professional”

Social-emotional intelligence is not fixed, it can be improved (but it can also go unused). Whether or not social-emotional intelligence will be leveraged depends on your leadership and the organization’s culture. Relationship conflict is particularly problematic, this is an obvious blindspot in the US.

All grown-ups were once children, but only few of them remember it.

-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 1943

Walt Disney designed the theme park from the perspective of a child. For example, when we first enter the theme park there’s buildings to the left and right, and the 2^nd and 3^rd stories of the buildings don’t appear realistic from an adult’s perspective, but they do look real from a child’s perspective. This speaks to the challenge of trying to understand other’s perspectives when we have a hard time seeing our own life’s previous perspectives.

The Accuracy of First Impressions

This brief reflection article discusses research on how it’s possible when we are attuned, to be remarkably accurate in reading other people. There is a link within this article that we encourage you to read. The issues discussed here raise implications for how you should manage your own non-verbal signals and how you can gather rich information about others through paying attention: https://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/07/the-accuracy-of-first-impressions-an-amazing-old-study-about-thin-slices-of-behavior.html

Self-Assessment: How Emotionally Intelligent Are You?

https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/ei-quiz.htm

What will being more self-aware do for us?

increase productivity, creativity, self-esteem, self-confidence, and communication
boost acceptance by others
encourage positive self-development
improve self-control, decision making, job performance, job related well-being
allows self-pride which in term enhances self-esteem

The Case for Mindful Engagement

People moving into new leadership roles often find themselves overwhelmed with demands on their time, higher expectations, and intense ambiguity and change. So it might seem hard to justify carving out time to reflect – to step back and think about what they’ve learned, and what they might do differently next time.

In a challenging and complex situation, people tend to develop a performance-based mindset that can undermine their personal and professional growth.

Research shows the key to professional growth is treating yourself like an R&D engine. How do you become a R&D engine? You embrace a learning mindset where mistakes are opportunities to learn. You have a laser-like focus on learning goals. You create experiments for yourself, seek feedback, adapt, and then repeat. And you reflect on success and failure.

https://michiganross.umich.edu/rtia-articles/case-mindful-engagement

One of the first steps is learning how and when to take a step back from the daily grind and just think. The trick is to make it a habit.

Lesson 2: How can knowing more about ourselves help us and help our connections with others?

Rather than try to become aware of how we’re feeling and land on one single emotion, think about the many different feelings we might have. For example, we might be torn, we might be hopeful, but also a bit fearful about a situation. Such tension, such opposites of emotions, which we call emotional ambivalence, we know is actually good for decision-making.

It’s very important to not only be aware of how you’re feeling in the moment but also try to put in effort to regulate and manage that emotion. Otherwise, you may end up having to spend much more time down the road trying to repair those relationships.

Lack of highly developed social emotional intelligence is really difficult to recover from. But all of us can be a little bit better and if we get a little bit better, it will be better for the world.

Lesson 3: How can emotions help us become wiser?

Let me make a general observation. The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold on to two opposed ideas in the mind. For example, to be able to see things as hopeless and yet to be determined to make them otherwise.

-Francis Scott Fitzgerald

Emotional complexity: feeling two or more different emotions at the same time

People who are feeling emotional complexity make more accurate forecasts, and are better at making decisions. When we are feeling complex and torn, both positive and negative, we’re actually more receptive to information that can confirm, or information that could disconfirm a particular decision. This flexibility in looking for contradictory, or alternative perspectives seems to come from feeling conflicted, feeling contradictory emotions.

Emotions are good when we’re pitching an idea, but we will be seen as more thoughtful and more worthy of an investment if we’re more authentic, that although there should be a lot of promise to our idea or we wouldn’t be presenting it, there are also some risks and having that authenticity come into the place where we’re pitching the idea can actually be quite helpful, ie. being both positive and negative, and seeing both sides of the coin from different perspectives to set proper expectations.

There’s a wonderful convergence of perspectives that to be more authentic in our emotional complexity, not just helps us make better decisions, but it also comes across as more thoughtful. Fortunately, those things match, they could have a mismatch, but there is a convergence on that. Here’s the paradox. When we ask people, would you do this? They said, “Heck no,” I will be seen as less competent. What you see here compared to the blue bars is a concern, a worry, a motivation to be more reluctant to engage in this emotional complexity pitching because I may be seen and others would be seen as less competent. What we’re seeing here is that on average, people tend to shoot themselves in the foot in the sense that, they know their idea will be improved more quickly if they’re more authentic about the imperfections of their ideas when they share them. Not to a client or to a boss but very early in the process to just others, however, we’re more reluctant to engage in this behavior because we’re worried about seeing competent. There’s some talk on the street about how it’s important to front or flex, and this is basically the concern that we’re seeing here. Now, what are the summary and implications for all of this? Well, I hope the paradox opens our eyes to the fact that we need to create a culture that is not just psychologically safe, where people can share imperfect ideas. Removing psychological safety is like removing a headwind as we’re sailing going forward. But we’d still be dead in the water, if we’ve just removed the headwind, we need to actually put wind in our sails, and that comes from modeling the legitimacy of having more emotionally complex feelings, being hopeful about an idea, but also concerned about its potential risks. So that not only are we seen as more thoughtful, not less competent, but most importantly, the ideas can get the attention they deserve. Modeling complexity is key. You as a leader have that opportunity.

How Successful People Stay Calm

Appreciate What They Have
Avoid Asking “What If?”
Stay Positive
Disconnect
Limit Their Caffeine Intake
Sleep
Eat Well, Take Care of Health
Squash Negative Self-Talk
Reframe Their Perspective
Breathe
Use Their Support System
Break: Mindfulness, Meditation, Relaxation

How Stress Can Shrink Your Brain and Impact Your Health

More stress equals less gray matter
- Two areas affected are the hippocampus, which plays a central role in learning and memory, and the prefrontal cortex, which regulates thoughts, emotions, and actions by “talking” to other brain regions.
- Folks who had high levels of cortisol in their blood did poorer on memory and cognitive tests. Over time, they also appeared to lose brain volume.
Elevated levels of cortisol can push you further down the road toward obesity, heart disease, depression, high blood pressure, and unhealthy lifestyle behaviors.

It is not enough to be aware of what our emotions are unless we can control them and utilize them appropriately at the right time and in the right place.

The ability to remain calm under pressure is a massive predictor of performance and resilience
Resilience is a process of adapting to trauma and stress
- Results in profound traumatic growth, a positive growth that comes out of a disaster

There is no one way to manage our emotions for positive outcomes. There are many ways.

Building relationships before you we need them
- Learning to ask for help, asking for help of others really is not that hard, but it seems to be for many people. It turns out that people are rarely turned down when they ask for help.
Gratitude
- Journal: write down 3 things we’re thankful for every single day
Implementing a stress relieving practice could be beneficial in many ways:
- exercising
- recreation (having fun)
- meditation

11 C’s of Leadership

Qualities of a world-class leader:

Credible
Caring
Collaborative
Connected
Calm
Creative
Confident
Curious
Communicative
Challenging
Conditioned

What Happens as We Age?

We Lost Our Creativity

Fear of failure and setbacks are inextricably linked with the innovation process. We must experiment to learn, and to learn, we must be open to failure (not crushed by it).

🙂 95% of five year olds are creative 🙁 5% of forty year olds are creative

School bullies
Poor teachers who provide poor feedback
Parents unable to control stress and take it out on their children

Meditation Improves Creativity

Calms us
Enhances our resilency

Mindfulness Practices Enhance 3 Essential Skills Necessary for Problem-Solving

opens our minds to new ideas
improves attention, making it easier to see the usefulness of ideas
nurtures courage and resilience in the face of skepticism and setbacks

Accurately Reading Others

Let soul speak with the silent articulation of a face

-Rumi

We convery alot of communication via non-verbal gestures.
- Allows humans to better coordinate their actions
- Visually impared folks display the same emotional expressions via their bodies and faces
Core humanity behind this lingua franca emotional communication
- transcends traditions, cultures, and languages

Our ability to accurately read the dynamic reactions of individuals and groups.

Empathy

Empathy is the ability to sense other people’s emotions, coupled with the ability to imagine what someone else might be thinking or feeling.
Research suggests that empathic people tend to be more generous and concerned with others’ welfare, and they also tend to have happier relationships and greater personal well-being.
Empathy can also improve leadership ability and facilitate effective communication.
But research also suggests that people differ in the extent to which they experience empathy.

Nurture Empathy Skills

Practice active listening: Active listening involves approaching a conversation with a genuine desire to understand the other person’s feelings and perspective, without judgment or defensiveness. When we engage in active listening, we tune into what our conversation partner is saying without interrupting him or her, paying careful attention to their body language and facial expressions and periodically repeating back to them what we think they’re trying to say, to make sure you understand them accurately. Research suggests that practicing active listening can increase empathy and improve relationship satisfaction.
Share in other people’s joy: Empathy is not just about commiserating; it can also be experienced in response to positive emotions like happiness and pride. Research on “capitalization” suggests that empathy for positive events—such as expressing enthusiasm when someone shares good news—can be just as important for relationship well-being as empathy for negative events.
Look for commonalities with others: When interacting with people who at first glance seem to be different from you, look for sources of commonality and shared experience. Maybe you’re fans of the same sports team or both know what it’s like to lose a loved one. If nothing else, you can remind yourself that you are both members of the human species. Seeing your Shared Identity can help you overcome fear and distrust and promote empathy and cooperation.
Read fiction: Reading a great work of literature—or watching a film or play—allows us to temporarily step out of our own lives and fully immerse ourselves in another person’s experience. Indeed, research suggests that fiction readers are better attuned to the social and emotional lives of others.
Pay attention to faces: Facial expressions communicate a lot about a person’s emotional state.

We are down and out, look at our faces, inspire us NOW! -[Non-verbal message from worn out employees to their leaders]

When we’re attuned to the subtle elements of how humans collaborate, coordinate, communicate these very subtle cues, ot actually can be fruitful even in our entrepreneurial ventures, trying to understand the subtle things which we take for granted between humans, communicating without words can be very productive, helpful. And it’s just fascinating how it can be used.
There is a wealth of information we can glean by paying attention to others, in particular the signals that they send to us intentionally or unintentionally
- non-verbal gestures, vocal intonation, facial expressions
We are very adept when we’re attuned into understanding something is going on with another person. It’s when we’re blind to this by not paying attention on only focus on the task at hand can escalate and excerbate problems.
- it is important to be attuned and acknowledge how people are feeling and more importantly to acknowledge that we are picking up on some non-verbal cues during communication

Emotional Aperture

Trees vs. Forest: Can We Read the Emotions of a Person and Groups?

Emotional aperture, much like the metaphor of a camera, is meant to convey this point of changing your depth of focus to bring into focus one particular person here, for example. Or shifting that aperture to bring into focus the larger group and back and forth. People tend to be looking at trees only or maybe only at the forest.
What drives a team’s ability to perform at exceptional levels across many different tasks?
- Turn-taking during speaking via social sensitivity (the emotional landscape)
Reading emotional landscapes is key to helping teams perform.
- When you’re able to read the group, you’re able to better get a sense, are people confused as a whole? Maybe I need to repeat. Are people getting bored as a whole. Maybe I need to accelerate. Is there a lot of distribution in how the room is feeling? Maybe there’s a lot of confusion. I need to clarify. Is everyone feeling the same, perhaps now we’re ready to mobilize.
- We can be more attuned and accurate at reading emotional landscapes and thus equipped with what we need to do in order to architect the atmosphere to fit the task at hand.
  - Very specifically, there often are two types of tasks. One in which we’re trying to mobilize a group to achieve a particular task because the solution is known. But there are times when the solution is not known. This is where creativity and innovation is key. Here we need a different emotional landscape, whereas in execution, we need people feel in the same. In innovation, having people feel differently or fostering those differences in feelings can allow groups to have better decision-making. We saw this when we talked about the connection between emotions and wisdom.

How Leaders Can Optimize Teams’ Emotional Landscapes

🙁 There are deleterious consequences of encouraging employees to share the same mood on work culture

In attempting to align employee’s emotions, leaders don’t consider the breadth of feelings and discount individual differences. This fosters a culture that is exclusive and inhibits diversity of perspectives–qualities crucial to promoting innovation and creativity.

🙂 Building upon the notion of emotional aperture to focus on how a leader’s ability to read and manage group emotions can influence a group’s ability to complete well-known tasks and more complex, ambiguous innovative tasks

Questions leaders should ask:
- What is the current primary objective?
- What is the current emotional landscape of the team?
- Are there any patterns in the collective?
Based on answers, leaders should use the appropriate strategies:
- Play 1 - Nurture emotions: when the task is execution and the current emotional landscape is aligned
- Play 2 - Align emotions: when the task is execution and the current emotional landscape is diverse
- Play 3 - Acknowledge emotions: when the task is innovation and the current emotional landscape is diverse
- Play 4 - Diversify emotions: when the task is innovation and the current emotional landscape is aligned

Feeling Differently, Creating Together

Variations in individual affective states more likely leads to improved group creativity if teams have a well-developed transactive memory system that allows members to effectively engage in an information exchange and elaboration process.

Reading Group Emotions is Key to Transformational Leadership

Leaders can be more transformational in the eyes of others when they become skilled at reading group emotions (i.e., using their emotional apertures).
Individual contributors an become more aware of the importance of reading group emotions.
Emotional intelligence, being able to see how people are feeling, feel the room or read the room is an important skillset for any leader because communication, our words, the direction we give, and how we give it is what’s going to allow us to be successful in our teams to actually hear what we’re saying, give us candid feedback. And then we can move forward in alignment.
- Today, especially when a lot of our communications is through technology. The filter of the technology can enable us to ignore the fact that there’s another person on the other side of that technology. That person is maybe not communicating via her words or his words clearly because we’re emphasizing shortness of our messages, ie. 40 characters. That leaves the door wide open for us to miss a lot of signals and subsequently fail in our efforts to communicate which drives poor decision making and poor results.
- Emotional intelligence is even more critical in today’s world of virtual technology, social media, texting, tweeting and an end. So even in our tweeting and emails, try to convey emotion.

What Do Transformative Mentors and Lasting Legacies Have in Common?

We will explore how transformational mentors and lasting legacies, the legacies that we leave behind are inextricably linked together. When we close the social and physical distance between us and others, it allows transformational change to blossom.

Coaching and mentoring are close allies in the field of helping others to grow and develop. Think and notice throughout this lesson how close these transformational relationships are to the legacies that we leave in this life.

Kata: Choreographer Movement

When we’re thinking of coaching, think of choreographing the way in which we coach because we are doing one of the most important things that we can do with another person. We are the choreographer in the development of another human being.

Building Trust

⭐️ People will not follow you if they don’t trust you.

Relationships are a very important part of life, especially corporate life.
Relationships are necessary for the creation of new knowledge, ideas, and products.
Our ability to work with and through others will determine our impact in organizations and with other people.
What matters to leaders:
- creation of relationships (build + nurture)
- underlying trust that is required to create those relationships
Don’t forget to turn around, check whether there are others following us.
- delve deeply into relationships, which are critical to furthering the work that we have to do together. Notice whether there is chemistry between us and others.
  - Chemistry includes friendliness, compassion, empathy, caring for one another.

⭐️ Without the formation of trust, no relationship can flourish and grow.

We have the ability to grow knowledge through establishing relationships with others.
- Non-work activities: do them before we get down to work.
  - Go out together, have fun, get to know each other on a personal level before we start to do the work. It is the same for all of us in our work lives, get to know the personal, build relationships first, and the results will be better.
- We know through research the results will be better, we will take the performance of our team to a higher level if we first concentrate on the personal. The result is that teams perform at a higher level.
- And if we are working remotely, make sure our cameras are on, have a coffee hour, Hi mom zoom call or whatever y’all do. Have a drink together or share things that are most important to each of us, share our strengths, share our weaknesses.
  - What about our favorite foods, or our favorite places?
  - The favorite countries in the world, the favorite things we like to do. I say people sharing before project execution and nurturing is an important part of keeping our relationships healthy and alive. We know the three ways to bring humans together faster and close its social or actual distance:
    1. storytelling: when we story tell, we elicit a positive chemical in the brain, because these emotions were formed when we were children upon hearing the words of our parents or our caregivers
    2. teaching: when we teach and coach, we first give the recipient the knowledge that we care enough about them to help them with something
    3. coaching: the giving of ourself with knowledge, expertise, and caring helps to build trust

Trust is the Currency of Relationships

It facilitates and is the conduit that helps bring people together, placing trust in another person allows us to feel safe and secure. If we are a leader in the organization who creates an environment where we feel psychologically safe, then we can bring ourself our whole self and our ideas to work. But how can we build trust? We have to listen, observe and ask questions. We also need to be open to hearing the answers to the questions that we ask. That’s part of our social emotional intelligence is having an interest in the lives of others. It really involves having empathy, not sympathy, there’s a very subtle difference between the two. We have to practice being in each other’s shoes, but not absorbing the emotions of others. This subtle difference between empathy and sympathy is important. We can’t get so close or involved that we feel the emotions so strongly of others so intensively, that we can’t help them. We need to maintain just a slight distance so that we can aid them in helping them solve their problem. We must put down our phones, look into the eyes of others, and try to understand through questioning, and creating a path for them to decide where they need to take themselves.

Personal Change is Difficult

Change is very difficult for most of us, especially as we get older
- We get comfortable and wish to stay in our comfort zone
More is learned and retained when we operate outside our comfort zone

Why are we so resistant to change?

Change it takes time and effort. It’s nice to remain the way things always were, especially as we get older.
As we become more experienced, the old adage is, we get set in our ways

Growth Mindset

We have a growth mindset when we’re open to new learning and allow ourselves to look at the world in a new and different way. We are a learner, not a knower. It’s also hard to do this because we don’t want to admit that we don’t know something. That we think others know it better than we do. Sometimes we don’t want to move from where we are because we’re afraid of failure. We may have failed at something and it hurt terribly and we don’t want to repeat that again. People learn from failures and successes. Sometimes even more from failures.

⭐️ Journal: What did we learn today that we didn’t know yesterday?

Difficult Conversations

Having the courage to have a difficult conversation is important to developing others. What would we do if we just had 1 percent more courage? Who could we help? Who could we grow in the future?

We want to be liked and appreciated
We don’t want to be vulnerable or feel exposed

Giving Feedback

Two Difficult Things in Our Lives

Giving feedback: 86% of organizations said its important to give feedback
Receiving feedback: 46% of organizations said they were able to do it

⭐️ Continuous improvement will not happen without feedback. Remember, feedback to feed-forward

Vague comments help nothing. We must be very clear when we give feedback
Before we give feedback, we also should ask the person, “Are you open to a little feedback today?”
This is very similar to storytelling. Tell the person what we saw, what we heard, or what we felt when they did the behavior that we are addressing
We want to have them think about what are the alternatives to their behavior and have them select an alternative that works for them, not for us. It must be their own.
Negative or constructive feedback should be done privately and soon after the behavior is felt, seen, or heard

Legacy, Mentorship, and Moments that Matter

⭐️ People will not remember what we said, they will not remember what we did, but they will remember how we made them feel.

Three Interconnected Themes

legacy
transformational mentors, and
moments that matter

⭐️ Mentors create their legacy through how they help other individuals in the organization

Legacy

As socially emotional and intelligent people connected to the earth and to the people on earth, what will be our legacy?
- Relationships and helping others
- Art, music, work, making money to support others or causes
It only takes a few seconds to change someone’s life, what have we done recently to enhance those around us?
Our legacy may change multiple times in our life and we may find it in unexpected places. Where are we looking? Are we passionate about where we are today? What could enhance that passion?
Regret has been touted as a wasted emotion, but all of us have regrets. I urge us to think of a regret and turn it around. What positive did we gain from the experience? Put the regret in an imaginary box and put it on a shelf.

⭐️ What will our symphony be?

Mr. Holland’s Opus